1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to methods for providing expansion card settings, and more specifically to influencing expansion card behavior based on the operating environment.
2. Background of the Related Art
An expansion card is a printed circuit board that can be inserted into an expansion slot of a computer motherboard to add additional functionality to a computer system. One edge of the expansion card includes an edge connector that fits exactly into the slot. The edge connector and slot establish the electrical contact between the electronic components on the card and the electronic components on the motherboard.
Expansion cards may be installed in many different operating environments, including blade servers. A blade server is a server computer having a modular design optimized to minimize the use of physical space. Whereas a standard rack mount server can function with a power cord and network cable, blade servers have many components removed for the purpose of saving space, minimizing power consumption and other considerations, while still having all the functional components to be considered a computer. A multi-slot chassis can hold multiple blade servers and provide services such as power, cooling, networking, various interconnects and management.
Although a blade server can be given new functions or increased capabilities by the installation of an expansion card on the blade server, the chassis hardware may then become the limiting factor in overall performance of the blade server. For example, newer and faster network interfaces, such as 8-bit Fibre Channel technology, may be introduced in a blade server by installing a corresponding expansion card. However, the individual slot or entire chassis in which the expansion card is installed may not support the faster network speeds, leading to various communication errors. One option for eliminating these errors is to provide updated hardware to the chassis or at least the chassis midplane that communicates the blade server I/O with a network switch. Another option is to restrict the placement of a blade server having high speed I/O to only those slots that are known to support the new expansion card capabilities. These options are taken only at the expense of a greater capital investment or the loss of flexibility in installing and relocating the server blades as desired.